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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (141542)	7/26/2004 6:02:49 PM
From: GST	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

2 million reasons for withdrawing 51 troops Rene P. Ciria-Cruz, Pacific News Service Monday, July 26, 2004 American officials, several of their allies and many U.S. media criticized Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo's decision to recall her nation's small military contingent in Iraq in order to save the life of Filipino hostage Angelo dela Cruz. They called the move cowardly and said it sent terrorists "the wrong signal." For most of dela Cruz's compatriots, however, and from the standpoint of their national interest, it was a sensible, even courageous move. There was more at stake in Arroyo's decision to pull out of Iraq than saving the life of an unfortunate hostage or avoiding the ire of the U.S. government, a key source of foreign aid for the Philippines. The hostage crisis imperiled a crucial survival mechanism for the impoverished nation -- the gainful employment of millions of overseas Filipino workers in the Middle East. Some 2 million Filipinos work in the region, with nearly a million in Saudi Arabia alone, according to the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs. These large contingents of Filipino workers have become a critical prop of the Philippine economy. They represent the millions who can't find work in their own country. They send home some $8 billion a year (remittances were largely responsible for a 4.5 percent GNP growth in 2002), providing otherwise income-strapped families the spending power that keeps the economy afloat. A number of Filipinos have been among the unintended victims of suicide bombings in Israel, and a number were killed in recent attacks on foreigners working for American firms in Saudi Arabia. For Arroyo to insist on remaining in the so-called "coalition of the willing," despite the terrorists' threats, would have exposed all Filipinos in the region to a dramatically higher level of danger -- where they are transformed into deliberate targets of terror because their government persists in giving political cover to Bush's "coalition" by keeping a symbolic military contingent in Iraq. In such an eventuality, the mass return of millions of Filipino workers evading terrorist attacks in the Middle East would mean disaster for the Philippine economy. The Philippine government is simply not prepared to absorb a sudden influx of jobless returnees. The large-scale repatriation of Filipinos from the Middle East also would mean trouble for many Arab countries -- including some of America's allies -- that have come to depend on imported Filipino labor or expertise for a multitude of tasks, from domestic work to construction and management. There can be no doubt that President Arroyo's decision to pull out of Iraq to protect other Filipinos was quietly encouraged by many an Arab host government. Clearly, Arroyo's decision was also politically self-serving, given the popular outcry for dela Cruz's safe return. Overseas Filipino workers -- an estimated 8 million labor in 150 countries -- risk their lives and endure long absences from their families. They're often called modern-day heroes by Filipino officials and media alike. In 1995, President Fidel Ramos' popularity plunged when he failed to save the life of Flor Contemplacion, a domestic worker who was hanged by the government of Singapore on a questionable murder conviction. Dela Cruz's kidnapping brought back memories of that execution, and the political danger was not lost on Arroyo. She had just assumed office after a bitter election whose credibility is held in doubt. Failure to bring back dela Cruz alive would have given her enemies effective ammunition in a poisonous political climate rife with talk of destabilization plots. For most Filipino opinion-makers -- and from the standpoint of the Philippines' national interest -- pulling out of Iraq was not a "wrong signal" to terrorists. The wrong signal was to send a troop contingent to begin with, which only served to militarize the longstanding and purely civilian Filipino presence in the Middle East and made it a likely target of terrorist attacks. As for Washington's implied threat of leaving the Philippines at the mercy of its homegrown terrorists, it's empty and face-saving. The Philippines remains the most important staging area for U.S. operations against al Qaeda's affiliates in Southeast Asia, as predominantly Muslim Indonesia and Malaysia are less than ideal hosts. In fact, several U.S. military exercises are set to take place in Southern Philippines. Like it or not, Washington is stuck with Manila, and Manila knows it. Rene P. Ciria-Cruz is an editor at Pacific News Service and Filipinas Magazine. sfgate.com

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (141542)	7/26/2004 6:35:11 PM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I am perfectly serious, and your account does little to answer my question. Political gain? Vietnam became a volatile issue, and since the electorate was mostly following the political leadership, and ultimately wanted to wrap things up, it was just as likely that one could gain by supporting withdrawal. Remember, Nixon won on Vietnamization and his "secrete plan" to get us out, once again showing his brilliance in positioning himself on both sides of the issue. Contractors? I daresay that they would have made as much on urban renewal contracts, without the risks, as they did in Vietnam. If their interests prevailed, we should have expanded the War on Poverty, not the war in Vietnam. Officers? This was a very civilian- run war. Johnson picked targets to bomb back in Washington. The misgivings of the military were mainly centered around the insufficiency of strategy to achieve the objectives, or, to put another way, the fact that the war was not run on sound military principles. Anyway, none of this has to do with my point, which is that there were no clearcut vested interests dictating the original commitment to Vietnam, on the Chomskey-esque "corporate interest" paradigm.

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (141542)	7/26/2004 9:59:04 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

The Pakistan Connection _________________________ There is Evidence of Foreign Intelligence backing for the 9/11 Hijackers. Why is the US Government so keen to Cover it Up? by Michael Meacher Omar Sheikh, a British-born Islamist militant, is waiting to be hanged in Pakistan for a murder he almost certainly didn't commit - of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002. Both the US government and Pearl's wife have since acknowledged that Sheikh was not responsible. Yet the Pakistani government is refusing to try other suspects newly implicated in Pearl's kidnap and murder for fear the evidence they produce in court might acquit Sheikh and reveal too much. Significantly, Sheikh is also the man who, on the instructions of General Mahmoud Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), wired $100,000 before the 9/11 attacks to Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker. It is extraordinary that neither Ahmed nor Sheikh have been charged and brought to trial on this count. Why not? Ahmed, the paymaster for the hijackers, was actually in Washington on 9/11, and had a series of pre-9/11 top-level meetings in the White House, the Pentagon, the national security council, and with George Tenet, then head of the CIA, and Marc Grossman, the under-secretary of state for political affairs. When Ahmed was exposed by the Wall Street Journal as having sent the money to the hijackers, he was forced to "retire" by President Pervez Musharraf. Why hasn't the US demanded that he be questioned and tried in court? Another person who must know a great deal about what led up to 9/11 is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, allegedly arrested in Rawalpindi on March 1 2003. A joint Senate-House intelligence select committee inquiry in July 2003 stated: "KSM appears to be one of Bin Laden's most trusted lieutenants and was active in recruiting people to travel outside Afghanistan, including to the US, on behalf of Bin Laden." According to the report, the clear implication was that they would be engaged in planning terrorist-related activities. The report was sent from the CIA to the FBI, but neither agency apparently recognized the significance of a Bin Laden lieutenant sending terrorists to the US and asking them to establish contacts with colleagues already there. Yet the New York Times has since noted that "American officials said that KSM, once al-Qaida's top operational commander, personally executed Daniel Pearl ... but he was unlikely to be accused of the crime in an American criminal court because of the risk of divulging classified information". Indeed, he may never be brought to trial. A fourth witness is Sibel Edmonds. She is a 33-year-old Turkish-American former FBI translator of intelligence, fluent in Farsi, the language spoken mainly in Iran and Afghanistan, who had top-secret security clearance. She tried to blow the whistle on the cover-up of intelligence that names some of the culprits who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, but is now under two gagging orders that forbid her from testifying in court or mentioning the names of the people or the countries involved. She has been quoted as saying: "My translations of the 9/11 intercepts included [terrorist] money laundering, detailed and date-specific information ... if they were to do real investigations, we would see several significant high-level criminal prosecutions in this country [the US] ... and believe me, they will do everything to cover this up". Furthermore, the trial in the US of Zacharias Moussaoui (allegedly the 20th hijacker) is in danger of collapse apparently because of "the CIA's reluctance to allow key lieutenants of Osama bin Laden to testify at the trial". Two of the alleged conspirators have already been set free in Germany for the same reason. The FBI, illegally, continues to refuse the to release of their agent Robert Wright's 500-page manuscript Fatal Betrayals of the Intelligence Mission, and has even refused to turn the manuscript over to Senator Shelby, vice-chairman of the joint intelligence committee charged with investigating America's 9/11 intelligence failures. And the US government still refuses to declassify 28 secret pages of a recent report on 9/11. It has been rumored that Pearl was especially interested in any role played by the US in training or backing the ISI. Daniel Ellsberg, the former US defense department whistleblower who has accompanied Edmonds in court, has stated: "It seems to me quite plausible that Pakistan was quite involved in this ... To say Pakistan is, to me, to say CIA because ... it's hard to say that the ISI knew something that the CIA had no knowledge of." Ahmed's close relations with the CIA would seem to confirm this. For years the CIA used the ISI as a conduit to pump billions of dollars into militant Islamist groups in Afghanistan, both before and after the Soviet invasion of 1979. With CIA backing, the ISI has developed, since the early 1980s, into a parallel structure, a state within a state, with staff and informers estimated by some at 150,000. It wields enormous power over all aspects of government. The case of Ahmed confirms that parts of the ISI directly supported and financed al-Qaida, and it has long been established that the ISI has acted as go-between in intelligence operations on behalf of the CIA. Senator Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate select committee on intelligence, has said: "I think there is very compelling evidence that at least some of the terrorists were assisted, not just in financing ... by a sovereign foreign government." In that context, Horst Ehmke, former coordinator of the West German secret services, observed: "Terrorists could not have carried out such an operation with four hijacked planes without the support of a secret service." That might give meaning to the reaction on 9/11 of Richard Clarke, the White House counter-terrorism chief, when he saw the passenger lists later on the day itself: "I was stunned ... that there were al-Qaida operatives on board using names that the FBI knew were al-Qaida." It was just that, as Dale Watson, head of counter-terrorism at the FBI told him, the "CIA forgot to tell us about them". _________________________ · Michael Meacher (massonm@parliament.uk) is Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton. He was environment minister 1997-2003 commondreams.org

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (141542)	7/27/2004 12:59:30 AM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

About a week ago, I met a young American sailor by the name of Nygong. His father was part of the resistance in Vietnam. His 4 brothers and sisters escaped Vietnam, they were a part of the boat people, they made it to Singapore. Eventually they emigrated to California. And then moved to Utah. Nygong speaks fluent Vietnamese. He spoke of his desire to free his country, said he would be the first in line if the United States ever went back to Vietnam. So when you ask who benefited. Try and not forget the thousands upon thousands of Vietnames who escaped Vietnam, and subsequently raised healthy and happy children in other lands. They benefited.